A wild magic sorceress born to a house of wizards, unwanted and disdained, until her pain brings her into Lolth’s embrace.
The magic that blooms with her adolescence is unwelcome in the House of T’sonri. Untrained, unpredictable, unsightly—burnt hands, broken plates, shattered windows. Mother snaps out careless girl! and thoughtless child!; sisters sneer useless and talentless and disgrace behind Arcanum-trained hands.
And Zeerith—magicless, forgotten Zeerith—salves her burns and repairs the plates and sweeps up the glass without a word. He has nothing, what she has isn’t worth having, and so together they are less than any T’sonri should be.
If she’d been the eldest, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.
She is not the eldest. She could have been, had fate twisted in her favour, but why would it? She’s never had any accommodations. T’sonris don’t need accommodations.
Her mother tells her she might be beautiful. Might be, if she lifts her head, smiles, keeps her mouth shut and her body still. Fix on a grimace, pin tongue between teeth, swallow wet red iron. The magic gets louder thus the girl must get quieter—it’s the only way to keep things under control.
Hours pass staring at her reflection, hair this-way-that-way; chin this-side-that-side; stains and powders and copying expressions from the portraits in the gallery, from ancestors who mattered. She can’t match them. She folds up her tongue, makes granite of her bones, but it doesn’t help and the mirror cracks and there’s blood on her hands on her dress on her face and that, she thinks, that is beautiful.
Why? Zeerith asks. The Weave hates me, she replies, and he shakes his head and bandages her hands and cleans the stains from her dress and tells her to be careful.
As if she hasn’t spent her whole life trying to be careful.
Zeerith leaves her. Why be surprised, why be hurt, why nurture the notion that anyone would want to stay with her? She’s a silent thing; spectre-girl haunting the estate, caged in sconce-light shadows up and down dark hallways, awake in a house of reverie, and even then their scorn screams through her; she can never be quiet enough to drown it out. What she has is not a gift, it’s an embarrassment. Magic means nothing if it isn’t earned. Someone erred before she was born, rendering her a walking reminder of a mistake she wasn’t alive to make. Bad in the blood.
So Zeerith leaves. Gone to play at sellswords with the one-eyed man, and everyone in this house, right down to the unborn relations swelling three separate stomachs, wishes she was the one who was gone.
When she shouts, the chandelier comes down. It was expensive. It was enchanted. Her uncle, the Archmage—he made that, Elvrae; why did you break it, Elvrae; why can’t you just control yourself, Elvrae?
(Her uncle is the Archmage. Why can’t she be the Archmage?)
Zeerith is gone. No-one to bind burns or mop up blood and broken glass. There is a hole in her heart and she cannot make herself stone enough to stand it, so she puts herself in a box. Small. Quiet. Confined. Safe.
It hurts to contort like that.
The box fills with fire. The box fills with shadows. The box fills with pretty dresses and perfect manners and bitten tongues and there is no room left for her.
It’s not fair. She could be as strong as them, as skilled as them, if they’d only let her out. But if it doesn’t come from a book, it doesn’t count. If it hasn’t been tried and tested to death, it doesn’t count. She doesn’t count. She will never count.
She wishes Zeerith would come back.
Her tongue is chewed to mincemeat. Her mirror has been broken for months. There is something missing that she can’t find; something present she can’t rid herself of—a whirlwind inside, spiralling, towering, ripping up pieces of her soul to feed itself, howling through the holes in her heart, and she can’t stay in this box, all the walls are crumbling, and no-one will listen. Very nice, Elvrae, go back to your room. Not now, Elvrae, the wizards are talking.
She is not a woman, she is a precipice. She is a neverending silent scream. She is a calamity waiting to happen.
She doesn’t think she has much longer to wait.
She returns from the darkness alive. There was something better than a broken neck at the bottom of the pit.
She had a mother who was her Matron, and now she knows her Matron was not her real mother. All drow have a real mother.
And mother knows best.
“Usstan belbau wuind Dos nindel vel’bolen zhah Dossta. Tlynn nindol vlos lu’nautkhurzon vlees lu’morfeth ol du’ased wund Dosst cress1.”
They didn’t care about the lizards. Nor the bats nor the snakes nor the blind fish that squirmed in her hands until their guts stained her to the elbow.
Now they care.
What have you done, Elvrae? What’s wrong with you, Elvrae? We always knew you were a monster; you have always been an ill-formed, immoral, hateful thing!
Her arms are stained to the elbows. There is blood in her hair. There is blood on the hands of those who march her through the streets and out the gates with all those strangers staring, judging, hating, shaming. If they had half the spine they think they do, they’d kill her, but this city is too compassionate for execution—as if exile is any less a death sentence.
It isn’t, though. Not for her. Because the holes in her heart are gone. There are no more wounds.
Only webs.
Devotions in the dark. All that is not to be eaten is for Her. Blood marks the walls all the way to Her city, trailing prints and clumsy prayers through caverns and tunnels, raw feet sliced open and washed numb in icy streams. The magic, louder than ever—free at last to scream—brings transformations. They fade with time, but even the most hideous warping of flesh feels better than a bitten tongue.
“Mrigg uns’aa, mrigg uns’aa, Ilhar! Mrigg uns’aa ulu Dosst elamshinae.2”
She does not arrive as a prodigal daughter. Offspring of heretics and runaway slaves—she is in exile and in agony, so close to Her and yet barred, still, even by the very hands She has exalted in this world.
(Archmage, he the Archmage? Why is he the Archmage; she could be the Archmage, just give her the chance!)
Waiting. Watching. They hunt through the Braeryn and she stalks them in the shadows; takes and takes and gives back because even if she goes hungry, She will not; even if she should starve, She will always be sated.
Blood to her elbows. Her shoulders. Her neck. Her mouth.
Sacred as the city is, this is not where she is meant to be. She returns to the darkness, unafraid. She will not lose her way. All webs lead to Lolth, and favour is granted only to those who take it.
Out of shadows the staff falls into her hands. Covered in spiders, drenched in power—so much gibbering, shrieking, raging power.
It’s hers. It’s for her, She says it’s for her. She says Do My Will and there is but one command to heed.
“Jal nindel’s yibin z’klaen el.3”
Her uncle is the Archmage.
Her uncle is on his knees.
Her uncle falls and falls and falls.
Her uncle is no longer the Archmage and, strangely, she doesn’t want to take his place. She could. But she doesn’t want to. She’s something more now, something greater than her family—unafraid to die but so, so terrified to live as she would have them live; so reluctant to live as they had her live—could ever have conceived of.
What she has is not a skill. It is not a talent. It is not a curse or a mistake or bad blood.
It is a blessing.